Insight for the Connected World [ Case Study ] KKBOX KEEPS THE MUSIC PLAYING WITH SEVONE THE CUSTOMER KKBOX is the top provider of streaming music services in Asia. Based in Taipei, the center of the Chinese pop music scene, the company has more than 10 million users and millions of available music tracks from more than 500 major and local music labels, Customer publishers, and artists. KKBOX also hosts the world’s largest Asian music library. ■■ The top streaming music provider in Asia KKBOX operates throughout Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and ■■ Size: Over 10M subscribers Thailand. For a monthly fee, subscribers get unlimited on-demand music that they can stream online or download from their smartphones, tablets and PCs for offline ■■ Headquarters: Taipei, Taiwan listening. KKBOX also offers live streaming of concerts and other entertainment events. Goal Ensure service quality and reliability by THE CHALLENGE strengthening its network monitoring and management capabilities. KKBOX’s tagline is “Let’s Music!” which reflects its strong focus on consistently delivering a superior customer experience. The company’s top priority is ensuring that its music tracks Challenge and streamed events are always available via reliable, high-quality delivery to customers Legacy monitoring tools were siloed anytime, anywhere, on any device. and unable to provide a unified view of the network, making performance Meeting this goal consistently across its broad operating area was becoming a growing monitoring and problem resolution challenge, however. Like all streaming companies, KKBOX relies on its network to meet its difficult and time consuming. Those customers’ demands. systems also could not scale to handle the company’s growth. To cover the multiple countries and regions in which it operates, and to accommodate its rapid growth, KKBOX runs a complex, multi-vendor network environment. Its network Results management coverage was provided by a collection of separate systems, including add-on ■■ Delivered complete, end-to-end modules provided by its hardware vendors, and tools from companies including MRTG network visibility. and Cacti. ■■ Gained real-time insights into network status and performance For KKBOX’s IT and network operations teams, using this patchwork of systems to issues in the early phases. monitor and manage its network was becoming increasingly problematic. Without full ■■ Enabled faster and more effective network visibility, KKBOX’s teams typically had to manually correlate performance and identification, diagnosis and management data from multiple systems in order to find and diagnose issues so they resolution of network issues (before impacting customers). could initiate remediation efforts. ■■ Automation of tasks formerly With average resolution times rising, and more issues threatening to impact subscribers, handled manually streamlined KKBOX team leaders realized that it was time for a change. They began to look for a high- network operations. performance, complete, unified and scalable network management system—and quickly found SevOne. “Before our SevOne deployment, we couldn’t get a cohesive view of our network,” said Ken Huang, Assistant Manager of KKBOX’s Network Engineering Department. “The legacy tools we had in place were fine when our environment was smaller and simpler. But it has grown and changed dramatically, and those tools weren’t keeping up. They made our network seem like a black hole. We could never see exactly what was going on, so finding and fixing problems was very difficult.” [Case Study] KKBox THE SOLUTION The KKBOX team researched various solutions and came up with a short list of vendors that included its legacy system providers and new contenders including SevOne and SolarWinds. After a rigorous evaluation of factors that included comprehensiveness of data collection, scalability, ease of use and overall performance, the project team unanimously chose SevOne and the SevOne Data Platform. It was a head-to-head win over SolarWinds. “The SevOne team showed us that they had solid experience in dealing with large, complex and geographically dispersed networks like ours,” added Mr. Huang. “Plus, their solution not only gave us the full visibility and real-time performance information we needed, its intuitive reports and dashboards made it really easy for our team to prioritize incident responses. In nearly every category, SevOne outperformed the competition.” With the SevOne Data Platform, KKBOX now has full visibility into all network and infrastructure elements that connect its corporate headquarters and datacenters with regional facilities and remote locations. With the deployment comes comprehensive data collection, automated functions, advanced analytics, and real-time performance insights that were not possible with the company’s legacy tools. RESULTS With SevOne Data Platform, KKBOX has the next-generation network management capabilities it needs to maintain the solid network reliability and high QoS that are a big part of the customer experience. Specific benefits KKBOX has gained include: ■■ Full network visibility – With comprehensive data collection providing end-to- end coverage and full visibility, the IT and NetOps teams know at a glance what is happening anywhere within their network and infrastructure. ■■ Intuitive reports and dashboards – Real-time status maps, unique workflow visualizations, and customizable reports and dashboards make it easy for technology and business groups, and individual team members to get the network performance information they need. ■■ Reduced MTTR – Advanced monitoring with more useful indicators, easy-to-customize thresholds and alerting, and sophisticated analytics have enabled the KKBOX team to be less reactive and more proactive with incident responses. This has enabled them to cut typical network issue resolution times down from hours to minutes. ■■ Streamlined network management – With increased automation in areas such as device discovery, and automated suppression of alerts and traps (during maintenance windows, for example), KKBOX’s IT and NetOps teams spend less time doing manual tasks which frees them up to work on more strategic initiatives. ■■ Future-proof network management – KKBOX’s network already spans multiple countries and continues to grow. With the highly scalable SevOne Platform, KKBOX has gained the flexibility and scalability needed to handle long-term growth as well as spikes in subscriber demand, such as around one of its live-streamed events. [Case Study] KKBox CONCLUSION By partnering with SevOne and deploying the SevOne Data Platform, KKBOX has broken through the limitations of it legacy tools and taken its network management capabilities to an entirely new level—the level required to consistently deliver a superior streaming music experience. SevOne has enthusiastically joined KKBOX in its signature shout-out to subscribers: “Let’s Music!” “[SevOne’s] intuitive reports and dashboards made it really easy for our team to prioritize incident responses. In nearly every category, SevOne outperformed the competition.” — Ken Huang, Network Engineering Assistant Manager, KKBOX CONTACT US. To learn more about how SevOne can help your organization move past the limitations of its legacy tools and gain next-gen network management capabilities, contact a SevOne representative via email at [email protected] or visit us on the Web at www.sevone.com. [ www.sevone.com | blog.sevone.com | [email protected] ] [Case Study]SEV_CS_11_2018 Devereux | 2.